Cases 19.09.2023

Vattenfall and Dagmar join forces: Online sales up, customer acquisition cost down

Vattenfall was able to anticipate early on how significantly changes in consumer buying behaviour would affect the entire business. As new electricity contracts are increasingly signed online, the success of the customer experience at every stage of the digital purchase path becomes a critical success factor. Growth was sought together with Dagmar by using the entire arsenal of growth marketing along the different stages of the customer journey. With brilliant results – every year.

How to grow online sales profitably in a fiercely competitive industry?

Swedish Vattenfall is the fourth largest electricity producer and the largest heat producer in Europe. Vattenfall is particularly known for its responsibility; consumers have chosen it as the most responsible electricity company in Finland for several years in a row.

Dagmar has had the honour of being Vattenfall’s digital marketing partner since 2019. Dagmar’s experts have helped Vattenfall to grow sales of new electricity contracts online for both new and existing customers. Not an easy task. Electricity companies fiercely compete for customers, and companies do not clearly stand out in the minds of consumers. The market is very price driven, so profitable growth is challenging. And the situation is not helped by the fact that issues related to buying and producing electricity are often considered quite difficult to understand.

Dagmar has been a significant partner for us for several years. Our cooperation with Dagmar has been versatile in terms of both website development and digital advertising. The cooperation has had a big impact on the fact that Vattenfall’s online sales have continued strong growth year after year

Santeri Määttänen, Product Owner – Head of New Sales team, Vattenfall

Continuous, holistic development work using growth marketing

Right from the start of the collaboration, it was clear that it would be difficult to reach growth targets if digital marketing is only considered through paid advertising. Therefore, growth was sought by using growth marketing tools along the different stages of the customer journey.

Dagmar has been Vattenfall’s digital marketing partner extensively. In addition to search, social, display, native and video advertising, Dagmar’s specialist experts have also consulted Vattenfall on the use of own data, search engine optimization, conversion optimization and data analytics.

The cornerstone of all success has been extremely close, silo-free and mutual appreciative cooperation. A trust-based work culture inspires and encourages to ideate new solutions for a common goal. Weekly work meetings and sprint model working make the operation agile – essential information moves quickly and new growth opportunities are constantly found.

Over the years, a lot of development has been done and many successful projects have been run together. Here are a few examples:

Production of dynamic materials for programmatic display advertising.
Price communication, A/B testing of content and production are scalable when market situations change quickly.
Versatile marketing dashboard views, the construction of which has utilized Dagmar’s Datacron®.
All results of digital marketing are visible in real time – also to agreed stakeholders. With Datacron, all data is stored in a common format, i.e. it is ready to use in the future for tools utilizing artificial intelligence and/or machine learning.
Own data is widely used in digital advertising channels.
Different care models and customer communication can be implemented in paid advertising.
Marketing lift analysis.
The impact of advertising on current customers was statistically verified.
Usability testing and online surveys.
Information for developing website usability and finding possible sales bottlenecks on the website.

Digital marketing environment is constantly changing, and keeping up with change requires re-evaluating and adopting tools, technologies and operating models. Vattenfall has succeeded in this very well and has been able to develop its operations year after year. This has directly reflected in the results.

Heikki Pieniniemi, Chief Business Officer / Growth Marketing, Dagmar

Online sales grow profitably – customer acquisition cost decreases

Comprehensive optimization has produced excellent sales results. Vattenfall has exceeded its online sales targets every year of cooperation, even by 80-150%.

The return on investment ratio of purchased advertising has been significantly improved, even though the budget has remained in the same range.

The cost of customer acquisition, or the efficiency of digital advertising as measured by CPA (Cost per Acquisition), has been significantly reduced over the years: